July 30, 2011

The minute you step on a BART train, walk down the street, or go to the mall, you’re bound to see someone on a cell phone, probably several people, in fact. People seem unable to wait for the doctor or stand in line at the post office without tapping away on a handheld device while they stare at the tiny screen. Cell phones are as much a part of our society as cars.

And yet, in the first draft of my book, my main character had no cell phone and I didn’t even notice until someone pointed it out. This probably stems from the fact that I use my cell phone once a month at most, sometimes less than that. But I’m in the minority here, so if I want to stay current, I need to bring my protagonist into the twenty-first century, gadgets and all, something I have to constantly remind myself to do.

I used to envy Sue Grafton as Kinsey Millhone went about her detecting, home computers but a glimmer on the horizon. Now, so much research can be done by Googling or using an app. How boring. But then I got to thinking, is sitting at a computer really so different than when Millhone goes to the hall of records and sits at a table? And she still types up her reports, albeit on a good old-fashioned typewriter rather than a laptop. Turns out the art of being a detective hasn’t changed all that much. Sure, we have slick iPhones that can tell us the current temperature, where traffic is backed up, and which restaurants have slow service, but the device can’t tell us where a suspect was at eight o’clock the night of a murder. Well, unless he posted his location on his Facebook page. Or twittered about it. But you get the idea.

Even with all the latest gadgets, detectives still have to go out and talk to people, investigate the crime scene, and use their intuition to figure out who’s lying. The basics never change, even when technology does.

July 29, 2011

The LadyKillers welcomes back an alumnus for this special "Fifth Friday" guest post: author Simon Wood!

Simon Wood is an ex-racecar driver, a licensed pilot and an occasional private investigator. Simon has had over 150 stories and articles published. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies and has garnered him an Anthony Award and a CWA Dagger Award nomination, as well as several readers’ choice awards. He's a frequent contributor to Writer's Digest. His books include WORKING STIFFS, ACCIDENTS WAITING TO HAPPEN, PAYING THE PIPER, WE ALL FALL DOWN and TERMINATED. As Simon Janus, he’s the author of THE SCRUBS and ROAD RASH. His next title, DID NOT FINISH, is due out in September.

I recently learned that someone is convinced that something in one of my books is real and I did it. This isn’t the first time this has happened. A few years ago, a woman at a book club who had read ACCIDENTS WAITING TO HAPPEN asked me in all seriousness how many times I’d cheated on my wife because the book partially dealt with infidelity. Others have pushed me for answers about different aspects of my stories and my culpability. It can be a little disconcerting when someone asks you, “Did you ever get caught stealing cars?” At the same time, I can understand why people will read something and put two and two together and come up with five. It might be fiction, but for any slice of fiction to be believable, the element of realism has to be strong. It has to get the reader to suspend their disbelief and buy into what they're reading.

A writer’s storytelling style plays into this problem too. While any writer can proclaim that their writing is a reflection of the world around them, a book says more about the writer’s world view than anybody else’s. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I show more than a little thigh from time to time in my stories. It’s impossible for my sensibilities and insensibilities not to show.

By the same token, when someone rushes up to me and demands to know how many times I’ve cheated on my wife, it reveals a lot more about their life and sensitivities than it does about mine. That’s the bugger about any story. Once it’s out there in the open, it’s a mirror and we all see something different when we gaze into it.

When it comes to the crimes I may or may not have committed, I have to fall back on Sharon Stone’s defense in BASIC INSTINCT. If I’d committed a crime, do you think I’d be daft enough to admit it in writing? I’m dumb, but not that dumb. :-)

I will admit that while none of my stories are reenactments of things that have happened to me, there are flickers of personal experiences contained within the pages. While it would be nice to regurgitate life stories in my books, it doesn’t work that way. They just don’t fit well within the confines of a novel.

That said, I do occasionally insert a few inside jokes in my stories for my amusement and the amusement of friends, coworkers and family. Perhaps, an old boss’ name is used for a character who comes to a grizzly end. Sometimes I do things for my enjoyment only and the eye rolls of others. I used Julie’s name for a character whose husband was cheating on her and I killed my mother-in-law in another. Don’t worry, I haven’t done these things but I know I’m going to get a groan out of them when they read the story.

Of all the things I’ve been accused of doing in real life no one has accused me of killing anyone. I guess I should be flattered by the fact that some people think I’m an adulterer, a thief, or a blackmailer, but not a murderer.

It’ll be interesting to see the kind of remarks I get for my most recent releases. ASKING FOR TROUBLE has people committing a variety of infractions from murder for hire to embezzlement. And TERMINATED features a bitter and twisted man who victimizes his female boss as a way of striking back at a world he views as unfair. There's even cruelty to the elderly, so heaven knows what people will say about that.

I suppose my only advice to you, my readers, is not to wonder about the things I write about, but the things I don’t write about. :-)

July 28, 2011

Inserting modern technology into a story line is fun when you're working in the past. For one thing, the "latest greatest" isn't a moving target: you pick your time, do your research, and that's that.

If I were writing something set present-day with a tech-saavy protagonist, I might have her pull out an iPhone 4. But, guess what? Before that book is finished and published, the reader will have access to iPhone 5 and beyond. It's just impossible to keep up.

But, pick a year like 1880, do your homework, and you can write without fear.

So, if you were living in 1880, what would you consider were the cutting-edge inventions ? (It's not a bad idea to back up a few years, because inventions sometimes move slowly into general knowledge.) Here are a few:

1877: Refrigerator car (for trains, of course), the microphone, the phonograph, electric welding (these are just some samples; 1877 was a prolific year for inventors, apparently)

But don't have your character pull out her fountain pen in 1880: it wasn't invented until 1884.

Edison and his phonograph: 1877

So, I can safely have my protagonist Inez gape in astonishment at an early phonograph in Mercury's Rise. Thomas Edison's invention received its patent in 1878, and was considered a "novelty." It was difficult to operate, except by experts, and the tin foil used to record voices only lasted a few playings. (Recording music was part of Edison's vision for the machine, but wasn't attempted until much later.)

It's fun to research (and imagine) how characters would react to the newest technologies of the day... along that line, I have a book to recommend, which happens to have the same title as this post (titles are not copyrighted, after all): The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage. And what was the Victorian Internet? It was ... the telegraph! It allowed people to communicate over great distances almost instantly, revolutionized business practice, gave rise to new forms of crime, and inundated users with a flood of information. You can read more about it in Standage's own words on his website here.

It's strange to think that today's cutting-edge innovations are tomorrow's antiquities. I wonder what future generations (say, three or four out from the present) will think of iPhones, iPads, Kindles, Priuses, contact lenses, etc. Will they be impressed with our ingenuity, or see our attempts as crude and backwards?

I suppose only time will tell...

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Sunday, July 31, on the Poisoned Pen Press Authors' blog, Ann reveals yet another technology of the past that grabbed her attention (and ate up her time with yet more research and with hanging around bidding on eBay) while writing Mercury's Rise. Drop in and see what 19th century invention captivated her imagination and her bank account this Sunday in her post on "Techno-Lust."

July 27, 2011

This is probably not what we LadyKillers had in mind for the topic, but I've been wanting to talk about this for a long time—how our kids are being ruined, RUINED, I say, from too much time on the computer.

How sad to think of all those hours not developing their bodies through aggressive sports, not being rewarded for winning while others lose, not developing important killer instincts. Not tackling, blocking, slamming, diving. Not hitting balls with sticks, kicking balls with their feet, smashing pucks on the ice.

Instead, these computer-literate juveniles are using their minds to surf the net, communicating with FB and email pals all over the world, trying different strategies for gaining access to interesting information.

My friend's ten-year-old grandson has established his own newsletter, using the web to share his thoughts on good software and his reviews of various on-line games. His unenlightened father bought him a home page instead of shin guards. What a waste. And what a missed opportunity to build a spirit of competition instead of cooperation

Let's get these young software and hardware junkies involved in sports. Here are the advantages:

• No more isolation. What's a boring on-line chat with friends in London and Australia compared to being outdoors with a large group of peers, half of whom are to be considered enemies? Where will a computer addict learn the spirit of sportsmanship, as in Kill Podunk Junior High? . (I know they say it's all about the playing and not winning, but, to quote Vince Lombardo, I ask: "If it doesn't matter who wins or loses, then why do they keep score?")

• Higher self-esteem. No more tough challenges like reaching level 5 from the comfort of her own room. In sports the child's value is measured fairly, in terms of whom he's helped beat and how often. Shelves full of plastic trophies will be reminders of success.

• More focused brain power. Typical eleven-year-old soccer players spend more than 120 hours in a twelve-week season, not including travel time to and from practice sessions and games, and not including time spent finding special socks and body armor. During their hours on the field their little brains are working only to support the movements of their bodies and to remember the code words to get through a particular game. No chance for idle wandering through open-ended intellectual minefields.

• Cost savings. For the money it takes to buy a decent computer system, printer, extra hard drive, and educational software, a child can be outfitted with grills, pads, and guards for every part of his body, plus enjoy countless posters and T-shirts with images of growling mascots or high-profile athletes on parole.

• Better citizenship. It's never too early to prepare children for the "sports as a metaphor for life" mentality of politics, second only to war words. Mission accomplished!

• More entertainment options. On my last cross-country flight, there were four free sports channels and two pay movie channels.

It may be harder to lure girls away from computers to team sports, since they've been so unwelcome in the past. Some ideas that might work: distract them with cosmetics and cover stories of super models; buy them jewelry-making kits for creativity. If their computer teachers are making a big deal of Countess Ada Lovelace, the world's first programmer, try tea sets to encourage social awareness.

Recently there was a big fuss over a guy who hit a ball into a certain zone 3000 times. So? If that's all you do all day is swing and hit, swing and hit, for years and years, shouldn't you be good at it?

But I like the idea of a 3000 club. Let's have a parade when a teacher finishes his 3000th class, or a doctor evaluates her 3000th medical test.

I wish I were closer to 3000 words in my new novel. Maybe if I had someone to beat?

July 26, 2011

Only some of my DNA is mechanically inclined. The Dutch part. If you have the chutzpah to push the North Sea back for a little extra farmland, you better be technologically astute lest you wake up some night, six feet under water.

So maybe the spirit of my one great-grandfather, who was a stone mason, will help me with this subject? Nah, all that does is explain my fondness for rocks—especially those that sit, one on top of another and form something architectural.

OK. Let’s try this again.

I write about the medieval period, and, contrary to a few opinions, there really was technology. That trebuchet was pretty impressive. Having watched some TV program where moderns tried to recreate one and badly botched their shattering of a stone wall, I concluded that successful use of the weapon required more knowledge of math and science than most of us have. (For me, that would be near-zilch.) And, if you watched the recent Kate/ Wills marriage, you saw some great views of Westminster Abbey. Now that place required some impressive technology. Yes, a medieval cathedral or two is sinking due to bad site positioning, but few of us can quarrel with the skill required in building gothic churches, many of which were capable of surviving longer than innumerable modern structures.

For those of us who write historicals, we often run up against the assumption with modern readers that all the complex stuff was done by us while our distant ancestors were pretty much mud and wattle types. That allows writers the fun of putting a few technological surprises in our stories. Remember the pyramids or Stonehenge? We may have some theories about how those structures were built, but, for all our great knowledge, we are still very clueless. And one of my favorite stories is that of Filippo Brunelleschi who built the cathedral in Florence during the 15th century with no concrete and only three construction deaths in sixteen years. The recipe for making concrete, by the way, was lost after the fall of Rome for several centuries. How much more have we lost or forgotten in technology that might improve on what we have? Now that is a perspective just dying for a good story!

July 25, 2011

This week, we're talking about technology in stories. What better topic could there be for an engineer-turned-mystery-writer?

Do I use much gadgetry in my mysteries? Not really. My series protagonist, Faye Longchamp, is an archaeologist, and they tend to use Iron Age tools like shovels.

But perhaps I'm being too hasty in saying that my Faye stories don't involve much technology. Since Merriam-Webster tells me that technology is a "practical application of knowledge," our notion that the word "technology" can be represented by the latest gee-whiz, up-to-the-minute invention is a bit limited. A shovel is a combination of the two of the six classic simple machines defined by Renaissance scientists as tools which use mechanical advantage to do work by changing the direction or magnitude of a force.

(And now I've probably lost some of you artsy, touchy-feely people. Let me try again: A machine is a tool used to make work easier.)

The six classic simple machines are the lever, wheel-and-axle, pulley, inclined plane, wedge, and screw. If you give a little thought to how a shovel is used, then you can see that the cutting edge is a wedge, and the handle that helps you lift the load is a lever. Voila! When Faye shovels a big pile of dirt out of the ground, she is using technology. Simple technology, but technology, nonetheless.

When Larabeth McLeod, the protagonist of my thriller, Wounded Earth, goes to work at the environmental consulting firm that she owns, she uses cutting-edge biotechnology to clean up polluted soil, water, and air. When her adversary, the raving lunatic Babykiller, blows up holding basins full of water that has been polluted with radiation-making nastiness since the dawn of the nuclear age, he is making use of technology that is 70 years old, but it is still just as deadly as it can be.

What does this tell me, as a writer of fiction? It tells me that I use technology every instant of the day, from the moment I use a fork to shovel breakfast into my mouth until the moment that I screw the water valve shut at night after I brush my teeth. Since I spent more than five years of my life studying physics and engineering, I might give a little more thought to how these things work than most people, but it doesn't change how they affect my life.

So it is with Larabeth and Faye and all my imaginary friends. If I let them do things that violate nature, like maybe having tiny little Faye lift a humongous boulder without the aid of a lever, then you, my reader, will notice. I will have lost you. But if I stop the story and do the math, so that I can prove to you in numbers that a six-foot lever is sufficient to allow Faye to accomplish this feat, then I will have lost you in a different way.

For me, the bottom line regarding science and technology in fiction is this: I must make sure that my fictional world makes sense in every way--physical, intellectual, and emotional. If the events in my story unfold in a way that is logical and true, then my readers will feel at home in my world.

July 24, 2011

Camille Minichino will be at Book Passage on Wednesday July 27 at 7 PM, with LadyKiller Rita Lakin and author friends Juliet Blackwell and Sophie Littlefield; and at M is for Mystery on Sunday, July 31 at 2 PM with mystery author Susan Cummins Miller.

Camille winds up her July blog tour at the following sites (note that Creatures and Crooks has been rescheduled to Monday, August 1)

Whether it's the latest iPhone app, up-to-date forensics techniques, or (in the case of the 19th century) electricity—the miracle of the modern age!—the LadyKillers will turn tech-y (or not) this next week on the theme: Technology in Stories.

July 23, 2011

Oh my, this is the kind of week that makes me wish I'd taken up some easier hobby, like cracking the code of dolphin language or really nailing the whole nuclear fusion thing. But no, I had to go and fall in love with writing.

At first, it's a glorious romance. Everything's fluffy. I wrote the first sentence of any story over and over without getting the least bit bored, though I learned not to share the gory details with others too often. A zombirific glaze sets in for normal people. It was easy at first, because it was 99% certain almost no one was going to see any of the first 100,000 words.

Then comes the awkard adolescence stage. Unlike real puberty, there are no physical markers. Instead of longing for the captain of the football team or wishing various body parts to sprout overnight, I dashed around in search of "My Voice." Which was fine, because it kept me writing, even if it is a fools' errand. And I had to write 100,000 bad words: mediocre sentences, scrambled paragraphs, hideous chapters, and forgettable novels, before the good ones came forward with any reliability.

There came a time when I could not utter the word "my voice" without my friends rolling their eyes. So I decided to forget about voice and work on craft, since that was something I knew I could improve.

Wouldn't you know it, as soon as I forgot about voice, and had made sufficient progress, dull, incremental, laborious progress, my voice was right there. It pops off the page once you clear the the cruft away. Or stop trying to write in a voice that isn't really yours. Who knew? I'm hoping that this leap forward makes me a grownup writer now. It's taken enough time...

I've been lucky enough to have a short story accepted in an upcoming anthology (more about that closer to the date!), and received my first professional edit outside of technical writing.

Oi.

I'd managed to annoy the editor so much early in the story, that even things that were perfectly believable seemed impossible to her by the end. But because I'd already written 100,00 not-great words, I could process her edits, sense the penumbra, synthesize them with other comments from trusted readers, and identify what to do: throw out half the story.

It's my favorite part of the story, and might end up in a novel, but it doesn't belong in the same story as the second half, which does work.

So, humbled again, I am locked in a hotel room right now, fixing the story, while half the world (well, 130,000 people, anyway) attend Comic Con. My husband is manning the table all by himself (kind friends and fellow comic book artists keep him in in food and coffee, bless their hearts!), my niece is wandering around the exhibit floor without her Con buddy, and I am swearing a blue streak, praying for inspiration before the maid comes and interrupts me again.

I have ony a few hours to turn 8,ooo mediocre words into a story that will be a credit, not a detriment, to the anthology.

So far, the first line is:

"Ashley cracked her knuckles above her keyboard, and waited in the chilly room, computer monitors glowing in the dark."

July 22, 2011

Some of my favorite opening lines don't begin any book. They're standalones; often they are complete single-sentence stories. I'm talking about the winning entries in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

The English Department of San Jose State University has sponsored this annual wordfest since 1982. Writers are challenged to come up with the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. With starting lines like these, the rest of the novel becomes superfluous.

The contest is named for Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, a minor (perhaps deservedly so) but prolific British novelist of the Victorian era. His best known title is probably The Last Days of Pompeii, but he is most famous for penning the immortal opening line: "It was a dark and stormy night … " Thus begins the novel Paul Clifford, the story of an English gentleman man who moonlights as a criminal.

The complete sentence reads:

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

Snoopy, famed beagle from the Peanuts comic strip, appropriated the first seven words for the title and first sentence of his own novel. Snoopy is not one to waste words. His entire novel is only 214 words, not all that much longer than Bulwer-Lytton's single sentence. A born mystery writer, he jumps straight into a suspenseful plot with his second sentence: "Suddenly a shot rang out."

Back to the Bulwer-Lytton contest: In its first year it attracted three submissions. In its second year, thanks to a little publicity, the number grew to 10,000. Writers are invited to submit as many abysmal first sentences as they like. One year a hopeful author sent in more than 3,000. If he had strung them together he would have had an entire book, which surely would have qualified as a the worst of all possible novels.

Entries are accepted any time, though the official deadline is April 15 -- which, as the contest's organizer, Professor Scott Rice, notes, is "a date that Americans associate with painful submissions and making up bad stories."

I submitted my own masterpiece of a first line one year. Sadly it didn't win, possibly because it exceeds the recommended length of not more than 50 of 60 words. I'm fond of it anyway, and I can't resist including here:

"Until the night he set her house afire, burning down the only home she'd ever known, incinerating the manuscript of her nearly completed novel, turning her cherished photos of Daddy to ash, though thank goodness the cats escaped … until the hour when sparks soared across the heavens like shooting stars and the smoke from the conflagration carried away all her hopes and dreams … until the moment when a firefighter squelched her screams and drenched her nightgown with a well-aimed hose … until that very instant Isabelle believed her love affair with Rolf would last forever."